War and the future: Italy, France and Britain at war eBook

HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

I. DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL?

All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas
of to-day are the realities of to-morrow. The
real history of mankind is the history of how ideas
have arisen, how they have taken possession of men’s
minds, how they have struggled, altered, proliferated,
decayed. There is nothing in this war at all
but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits.
The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression
and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against
the fundamental sanity of the German mind and the
confused protest of mankind. So that the most
permanently important thing in the tragic process of
this war is the change of opinion that is going on.
What are people making of it? Is it producing
any great common understandings, any fruitful unanimities?

No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration,
but is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration?
We are told all sorts of things in answer to that,
things without a scrap of evidence or probability
to support them. It is, we are assured, turning
people to religion, making them moral and thoughtful.
It is also, we are assured with equal confidence,
turning them to despair and moral disaster. It
will be followed by (1) a period of moral renascence,
and (2) a debauch. It is going to make the workers
(1) more and (2) less obedient and industrious.
It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with
a passionate resolve never to suffer war again.
And so on. I propose now to ask what is really
happening in this matter? How is human opinion
changing? I have opinions of my own and they are
bound to colour my discussion. The reader must
allow for that, and as far as possible I will remind
him where necessary to make his allowance.

Now first I would ask, is any really continuous and
thorough mental process going on at all about this
war? I mean, is there any considerable number
of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking it in
as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from
which they can form directing conclusions for the
future? Is there any considerable number of people
even trying to do that? At any rate let me point
out first that there is quite an enormous mass of
people who—­in spite of the fact that their
minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who
are at present hearing, talking, experiencing little
else than the war—­are nevertheless neither
doing nor trying to do anything that deserves to be
called thinking about it at all. They may even
be suffering quite terribly by it. But they are
no more mastering its causes, reasons, conditions,
and the possibility of its future prevention than a
monkey that has been rescued in a scorching condition
from the burning of a house will have mastered the
problem of a fire. It is just happening to and
about them. It may, for anything they have learnt
about it, happen to them again.